... and I found it empty.
The storyline could have been interesting, but instead the director played up too many standard stereotypical arcs, creating basically a two-hour waste of time.
How so? Well let's go through the list:
- The core character crew is thrown together by momentary accident and necessity.
- Half the group knows each other by years of salty experience.
- There's one newbie who takes too many risks and gets everyone in danger and some killed.
- Some of the core team gets killed.
- The bad guy is a politician dictator who is going to die in the end.
- Lots of guns.
- Lots of manual fighting even though today's urban battlefield would generally be a decimated field of rubble.
- Everyone is using film cameras when the reality in 2024 is digital cameras.
- The journalists don't care (but they really care after all).
- The rookie survives and becomes a heartless experienced player.
- The bad guys are literally copy-pasta'd out of a backwater El Salvadorean death squad, complete with a back country pit full of dead bodies.
- Characters with foreign accents get killed first (kind of like the red shirt guys in Star Trek episodes).
- No one has a clue how the Civil War started but California and Texas are rebellious, of course.
- The people in safe zones are all suburban and white, and the people who become refugees are all minorities.
And the list goes on. I literally ended up trolling the Internet halfway through the movie because I got so bored. The concept of Civil War was timely but the effort was completely dropped in the first five minutes and never salvaged. What a waste of film, actor's time and everything else. Worse, I can't get those two hours back in my life. dammit.
